ABSTRACT

In response to rapidly increasing consumer demand for quinoa in the USA, farmer interest in – and experimentation with – quinoa production has grown considerably in recent years. As reported in this chapter, field experiments were designed to test whether (1) yield increased with participatory selection on heterogeneous quinoa populations and (2) yield and agronomic performance of breeding lines selected by farmers surpassed the performance of the commonly grown variety, ‘Cherry Vanilla’. A farmer-driven selection index determined the five best-performing breeding lines for each of three locations, and nine unique breeding lines that outperformed Cherry Vanilla were selected. In 2016, the evolutionary participatory breeding method resulted in yields higher than the evolutionary breeding method. Additionally, two populations that underwent selection by participating farmers out-yielded the parental variety ‘Black’. Heterogeneous populations have the plasticity to provide farmers with increased within-field diversity and improved stability over time, while participatory selections made from such populations can lead to the development of uniform varieties adapted to specific agro-environments and farming systems.